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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Hunger in America

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Pat Meadows <pat@meadows.pair.com>
  • To: "self-reliance, networking, and simple living, for small farm sustainability, rural independence and security." <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Hunger in America
  • Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2004 14:21:25 -0500


>Wonderful summary of strategies, Pat. Robert Waldrop's strategies from his
>experiment and your list make it clear that people who have and use multiple
>food related skills can eat in much more steady and healthy way. If you
>were starting with a person who has been feeding themselves mostly with fast
>food and frozen dinners and now needs to feed themselves on a low income or
>food stamp budget, what do you think is a good order to help them learn the
>skills in? And let's say the person has a positive attitude and wants to
>learn, but just has never had much contact with people who cooked from
>scratch, so they are unknowledgeable about many useful things. I think
>frugal shopping is a good place to start as that allows the person to
>maximize their money from the start and quickly. But is seems to me that
>that needs to be followed almost instantaneously with maximizing nutrition
>and at least some basics of scratch cookery or the person is sitting there
>looking at their bag of flour and wondering what's for dinner :-) ?

I don't know, Sharon. I have wondered about this too.

I think, though, that I would start with teaching people how
to make a few soups. After that, whole-grain muffins and
quick breads. Those are pretty easy, and everyone seems to
like them.

But you know: everything is useless unless people have
decent lives: that's the prerequisite - decent housing, and
decent lives with some stability.

If every day is a struggle for survival because you are
working 60 hours a week, or because you are in really bad
health, or on drugs or booze, or clinically depressed, or
being beaten by a boyfriend, or going through a nasty
divorce, or trying to cope with more little children than
anyone should have to cope with at once: forget it. You
cannot learn. You cannot work for improvement when you are
struggling for survival.

So I don't know.

And to anyone who kindly suggests it, while I appreciate the
vote of confidence: I am not teaching a course in basic
cooking. I have thought about it - I thought about it a
long time.

But my own health is now such that I cannot commit to do
anything at a specified time, plus I need whatever very
limited productive time I have for taking care of things at
home. If someone gave me a new, younger, healthier body:
that would be wonderful! <g> Or even just a healthier one,
it wouldn't necessarily need to be younger. I could do an
awful lot more then.

Pat
--
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